Contemporary pharmacy practice
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Pharmacists are becoming involved increasingly in a patient care. At the University of California, San Diego Medical Center, a pharmacist has become a member of the multidisciplinary burn team. ⋯ The pharmacist has found his association with the burn unit to be professionally rewarding and the attending surgeons and surgical house staff have found his input to be valuable. The authors encourage other burn units to enlist a pharmacist as part of their burn team.
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A decentralized emergency medicine clinical pharmacy program was initiated and has operated now for over 1 year. The program attempted to answer two questions: is there a viable clinical pharmacy role in emergency medicine, and could staff pharmacists successfully function in such a role without formal clinical training and experience? Initial primary objectives were to provide an on-the-spot pharmaceutical consultation service and to initiate new or expanded traditional pharmacy support to staff and patients. A secondary objective was to provide expanded outpatient prescription service to emergency room patients.
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Several pediatric dosing rules commonly are published in medical and pharmaceutical texts. However, most authorities do not regard these published dosing rules (e.g., Clark's weight rule) to be responsible approaches to pediatric dosing. This study compares the actual doses administered to patients in a 310-bed, university-affiliated, pediatric hospital with the dose calculated for each patient using Clark's weight rule, Clark's surface area rule, Young's age rule, and Shirkey's dosing recommendations. ⋯ Responsible dosing must involve more than the application of commonly published, pediatric dosing calculation rules. Shirkey's recommendations provided the most reasonable approach to pediatric dosing. However, pharmacists should monitor these patients carefully and recommend dosage adjustments whenever necessary.
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Contemp Pharm Pract · Jan 1980
Pharmacy competencies: their relative importance to consumers, practitioners, educators, and students.
The pharmacy profession increasingly is involved in developing and maintaining competency standards as objective criteria in evaluating the educational process and in judging practitioners' continuing competence. This study compared the rankings of various pharmacy competencies among diverse populations, specifically, consumers, practicing pharmacists, pharmacy educators, and pharmacy students. The competencies were assessed through a questionnaire which required the respondents to rank 17 competency labels in order of importance. ⋯ Faculty tend to rank highly the clinical roles of the pharmacist. The highest rank correlations on pairs occurred between students and faculty (0.89) and between pharmacists and consumers (0.89). The lowest rank correlation occurred between faculty and consumers (0.64).